Chen Zhen's legacy: the last works of this noted Chinese artist are the focus of an exhibition opening in New York this month. Through sculptures, installations and an unrealized project for a Zen garden, Chen explored themes of illness, exile and cultural difference

Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

In 1986 Chen emigrated to Paris, where he felt his way slowly, living in isolation, learning French and pursuing additional art studies as he educated himself in Western art history and the ways of European life. During this period he survived by painting tourist portraits along the Seine. When he resumed his art career in 1990, it was as an installation artist rather than as a painter. His early installation works were marked by the shock of his encounter with the wastefulness of consumer culture. They dealt with issues like ecology and the imbalances created by industrialization. In time, as he began to gain recognition and to travel on the international exhibition circuit, he became increasingly interested in human conflict and in the need to discover a new mode of artistic and social intercourse that blended Chinese and Western ways of thinking.

At the ICA, the lower floor was taken up by one of Chen's most powerful statements of this problem, Jue Chang (50 Strokes to Each), 1998. Visitors found a large gallery filled almost to the bursting point with the weathered chairs, beds and stools from around the world that make up the piece. Chen altered each piece of furniture by stretching a piece of animal hide across its frame, thus creating a drum. These unusual instruments hang from a large wooden armature, also scarred with age, the shape of which suggests a Chinese ideogram. Dangling within arm's reach from the upper bar of the armature were scores of wooden sticks with which viewers were invited to beat the drums. Whenever this work has been shown, audiences have taken up this invitation with enthusiasm, inundating the gallery with a boisterous percussion concert.

The title of the work refers to a Chinese maxim which advises that conflicts be resolved by physically striking the disputing parties. But the piece also has a spiritual dimension: in Buddhist tradition the seeker after enlightenment is dealt a sharp blow by the master to jolt him out of everyday consciousness. Jue Chang was originally presented in 1998 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where its message about conflict resolution had particular pertinence. In its subsequent presentations, which included the 1999 Venice Biennale, Chen's spiritual and political messages tended to disappear beneath the sheer exuberance of the audience reaction, as the artist himself admitted. At the ICA, however, where it served as prelude to a series of works dealing more specifically with issues of health and medicine, the cathartic release provided by the drums suggested that celebratory play may have a healing action of its own.

The mood darkened as one climbed the stairs separating the ground floor and upstairs galleries. Suspended in the stairwell was Black Broom (2000), a sculpture in the form of a giant broom. However, instead of bristles, its brush is composed of lengths of black rubber tubing of the sort used in blood transfusions. Some of the tubes end in sharp hypodermic needles, giving the work a physically threatening aspect. The notion of cleanliness, with all its connotations of physical hygiene, became menacing as one circled this work on the way upstairs.